


yeah we're damaged (badly damaged)

by merricatblackwood



Series: can't we be seventeen? [6]
Category: Cloak & Dagger (Comics), Cloak & Dagger (TV 2018)
Genre: F/M, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-23
Updated: 2018-07-23
Packaged: 2019-06-14 20:35:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15396936
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merricatblackwood/pseuds/merricatblackwood
Summary: light burns up everything and tandy hits her breaking point.





	yeah we're damaged (badly damaged)

Tandy Bowen divides her life easily into two sections, Before and After.

Before she became a teenage runaway, before she lit up like a christmas tree, before she met Ty.

After is when everything else happened, when she suddenly developed a desire for spandex, for fixing the world and taking down the people that did this to them. 

For making sure that there are no more kids like them.

After is when she started thinking about her Mom.

After is when Ty told her stories about his Mom, about being picked up from basketball practise, about someone listening to him.

She remembers asking "You mean your Mom never told you stuff like that?" while Ty stares at her, like there's something wrong falling out of her mouth.

"No," He says gently and she can place the look on his face, horror, sadness - something like that.

Mom used to enter her in beauty pageants, she remembers the way her Mom would bury her nails into her shoulders and say "Why couldn't you have tried harder? You're pretty enough, aren't you?"

She remembers her Mom travelling all over the world, the last minute notes - Tandy can take care of herself, see?

She'd hardly known Phillip when Mom had married him, he'd tried and then he'd stopped.

(Tandy hears her Mom on the stairs at four in the morning, "It's fine, she's just not worth it,")

Tandy runs away from home at seventeen, she goes back a few months later.

"I had to call a fucking PI to try and find you kid," Mom says, huffing on a cigarette, "You know how expensive those guys are? They bled me dry, for you,"

(She would tell Ty, years later - that she'd just wanted to know if her mother had cared.)

She has not forgotten how easily her mother's voice raises, how shouting turns into screaming and how easily Tandy remembers being six.

She remembers Mr Bunny being thrown into the trash and "You must have put him there, huh kid?" 

Tandy remembers a lot of things, she is seventeen and there's a light that burns inside her. 

It's like being the sun, it hurts and it hurts when she hurts. 

"Stop it," She says, exhausting and crying. She cannot stop a hurricane, when she is the hurricane.

"Just stop it please,"

Mom has never known how to stop, she's never known when to stop. 

Tandy lets go.

Ty is the first to find her, of course, they could find each other with their eyes closed.

"I hurt my Mom," she murmurs into his chest, Mom is still breathing but she hasn't moved. She doesn't know what that means or how to feel about it except, "And I...I almost feel glad, she was just...she wouldn't stop and I didn't know what to do, I tried, I just..." 

She cries exhausted tears into his chest.

"She hurt you," Tyrone says, "You were scared, that's not your fault. Okay, it's not your fault you were scared,"

Tandy Bowen is still afraid. 

She stares up at him then, searching for an answer in his face. She wants absolution, they are sanctuary to each other and maybe that's all that matters.

There are splinters around her edges, sometimes it feels cracked and broken in her - like something terrible and rotting will spill out through the crack in her chest.

They are damaged broken things both of them, they are whole but something about them together smooths over the cracks. 

The cracks never go away but it's something soft, understanding and gentle. 

She curls underneath the cloak, before gently she murmurs "Take me away from here?"

And he does.

**Author's Note:**

> so this verse as you've probably picked up on by now is a mix of classic cloak and dagger and the show, this is one of my main points I took from the comics (because I love my poor damaged angsty kids), is that tandy's mom is emotionally, psychologically abusive and neglectful and everyone (except tyrone) tells tandy that she should be grateful because her mom gives her the basic requirements to live.
> 
> hooray!
> 
> anyway it's uh important to me, so it's here and this is me adapting one of the storylines because my poor kids and it's canon to this verse so.
> 
> we were made to suffer!!
> 
> @bitandybowen on twitter


End file.
